Militant moderate, unwilling to concede any longer the terms of debate to the strident ideologues on the fringe. If you are a Democrat or a Republican, you're an ideologue. If you're a "moderate" who votes a nearly straight party-ticket, you're still an ideologue, but you at least have the decency to be ashamed of your ideology. ...and you're lying in the meantime.

Friday, October 02, 2015

Fifty-One Foot Ladders

Janet "Big
Sis" Napolitano was the Governess of Arizona when the illegal immigrant hydra-crisis
came to one of its several heads.The
simple, indeed simplistic, solution offered
by the simple, indeed simplistic,
illegal alien crisis mongers in Big Government was to build a fifty-foot wall
on our southern border.Big Sis scoffed
at the idea [primarily as it was a republican notion and she was a democrat],
claiming that immigrants would only build a fifty-one foot ladder.She, of course, was right, although not
literally and only by coincidence.

The
US-Mexican border lying in the urban sprawl between San Diego and Tijuana has
walls, rows upon rows of chain link fence, and concrete barricades.There are no fifty-one foot ladders there.Instead, there are professionally constructed
tunnels through which the Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Honduran illegals pay the
Mexican gate-keepers a premium price to pass.It's safer and significantly more convenient than trekking for a week
through the bakery of the Sonoran Desert.

The Tijuana
tunnels are lined with concrete for durability, plumbed, electrically lighted,
and wide enough to bi-directionally zip golf carts and small warehouse
forklifts through, as well. The golf
carts can carry illegals, but the forklifts each haul a few tons of illicitly-manufactured
methamphetamine, courtesy of the Mexican drug cartels, for the ultimate
destination of the illegal US drug market.

Satisfied with the improvement, are we?The Big Government solution to illegal immigration failed to solve the
problem and instead ushered in a slew of unintended consequences.Go figure.

My lingering
nag over our efforts to curb "The Meth Problem", is one such
consequence.I can't recall how many
times I've scolded that the simple, indeed simplistic,
method offered by the simple, indeed simplistic,drug crisis mongers in Big Government to
reduce methamphetamine was doomed to failure.Their solution: monitor all purchases of over-the-counter allergy
medicine with police state apparatus and arrest anyone purchasing too much
pseudoephedrine, because that's one of the few dozen ingredients used in
home-cooked methamphetamine.

It's not
even one of the ingredients you need a license to purchase, by the way … or it
hadn't been.In several states,
pseudoephedrine now needs a prescription; in the rest, you are required to
produce an ID card, to facilitate police state monitoring, prior to
purchase.The net effect on "The
Meth Problem"?Bupkus.

The
home-cooked portion of "The Meth Problem" was miniscule at best,
self-defeating at worst.Slack-jawed
peckerwoods in their rural trailers cannot pop enough of those infernal
blister-paks of allergy pills into the pot on their Coleman campstove to make
more meth than can be taken for personal use.And the peckerwoods tend to blow themselves up anyway —
"problem" solved."The
Meth Problem" is and always has been the abuse of prescription
methamphetamine [clinical uses: narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD, one of which is
epidemic in the US, and another of which is a faddish diagnosis], supplemented
by trafficking of the prescription-grade product of the Mexican cartels.Home-cooked meth, low-grade
"crystal" meth, barely even constituted statistical noise in the
matter.

Yet our Big
Government solution was to target crystal meth and ignore the primary issue,
now compounded by our "build a wall" Big Government solution to
illegal immigration.When asked, our Big
Government problem-solvers will report that the allergy pill interdiction
effort has reduced "The Meth Problem" by some massive figure, say,
50%.Yes, crystal meth on our streets has been reduced, but it was only a single-digit
percentage of the problem in the first
place.What they won't tell you, and
what you'll have to learn elsewhere, is that prescription abuse and Mexican
product is up by around 20% each year for the past decade.

As a result,
"The Meth Problem" is even bigger than it was.In the meantime, Indiana grandmothers are
serving 10 years in prison for buying too many sniffle pill packages in a
24-hour period when their entire family came down with a cold at once.And isn't that a relief!

Are we happy
yet?Are we done having Big Government
"solve" the "problem" of a few individuals doing stupid,
sometimes legitimately illegal, things and inconveniencing the rest of us?Are we done paving the way for large,
institutional stupidities and illegalities?Not even close.

The Big
Government solution to a few corporate farms slapping "organic" on
their non-organic apples was to create an organic certification process so
cumbersome and costly that organic farmers — small by nature and with gross revenues
to match — cannot afford to legally call themselves "Certified
Organic".Any food you find in
stores with the organic label is primarily the Ag-giant entities pawning off
the same non-organic food [at a significant mark-up] as they always did.

Big
Government abhors small business.Big
Government doesn't even understand how to deal with small business — primarily
by leaving it alone — because Big Government isn't capable of leaving anything
alone.Big Government is big for the
simple fact that it involves itself in all things.Those things must then expand to accommodate the
government intrusion.A doctor could run
a small, successful medical practice with a single nurse/receptionist/clerk forty
years ago; twenty years ago, in order to comply with state insurance
regulations, that same small, successful practice would have to hire two
clerical staff — "medical billing specialists" — just to process insurance
paperwork.

Ten years
ago, in order to comply with HIPPA, it was required to hire three more clerks
to process the rest of the paperwork ensuring that your medical information be
given only to yourself … and the government, and anyone who could hack your
doctor's computer to obtain all the information required by law to be
permanently stored.Obamacare requires photo
identity verification of all people seeking medical care — the same identity
verification that is called "racist" when it occurs at the voting
booth — and even more paperwork and mandatory, permanent storage of data, as if
it needs to be said.

Those medical
billing specialists expanding the small medical practice into a major
undertaking cannot get hired without the same "racist" photo identity
verification due to another Big Government solution to illegal immigration. eVerify
is the RealID Act program created by the Department of Homeland Security which,
a la Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia,
and every tinpot totalitarianism of the industrial age, requires a citizen to
justify his own existence to his own government before doing something as pesky
and meddlesome as getting a job.Instead
of prohibiting illegal aliens from taking jobs away from Hard-Working Americans®,
it creates a large false- and fraudulent-ID industry.This, then, not only fails to bar illegal
aliens from getting jobs, but also gives the enterprising American
criminals-by-other-means a way of hiding in plain sight.

As if false
and fraudulent IDs weren't enough of a problem now, thanks to the ministrations
of Big Government inspiring Big Crime, Big Government is now attempting to
address identity theft and with predictable results.Big Retailers have stored credit card
information in their computer systems unnecessarily for decades; it allows them
to recognize repeat customers, track the types of purchases they make and
otherwise serve a vacuous "personalized" advertising scheme.Stored information can be stolen by hackers,
and several Big Retailers have had their computers hacked resulting in ID
thievery and credit card compromises.

But instead
of ending the unnecessary practice of storing personal information and losing
all that free, "personalized" advertising, Big Retailers threw up
their hands and said they didn't know what to do about it.So Big Government stepped in.Instead of Big Government prohibiting the unnecessary
storage of customer credit information, it devised a manner of simultaneously allowing
all Big Retailers to continue to unnecessarily store credit card information,
reduce the credit card fraud perpetrated by small-time hoods with low-tech
abilities, AND guarantee that virtually all future ID thievery will be
conducted by the criminal gangs in the Ukraine and warehouses full of hackers
in Russia, China and North Korea who have access to their own Big Government
hi-tech.

Such foreign
hacking is a growth industry and results in the illegal theft of American citizens'
money into the pockets of those foreign governments before anything can be done
about it, none of which includes prosecution of the crimes committed.This money can then be used to purchase
American government debt to await the day in the foreseeable future when US
sovereign debt exceeds our ability to repay it by merely cinching our belt for
a few generations.The US government
will be penniless like Greece is today and the Soviet Union was three decades
ago.But unlike Greece, there is no
Germany wealthy enough to fund us through our bankruptcy, and unlike the Soviet
Union which had NATO warning off foreign claim-jumpers, no one will have the
ability to stop US territory from being divvied up — by force or otherwise — among
our creditors.As I've advised before:
better learn Mandarin or Spanish.

The fifty-one
foot ladder our Big Government is inspiring among our enemies is the computer
chip required to be embedded on our credit cards.These chips make low-tech credit and ID thievery
all but impossible, but doesn't even constitute a speed bump to hi-tech
thieves, which are overseas criminal organizations and enemy governments.

Our Big
Government not only loves Big Business and inhibits small business, it
loves other Big Government, particularly those actively trying to destroy
it.I'd say it would serve our Big
Government right not to mention the millions who want Big Government to get
even bigger.Unfortunately, it would
also have a severe impact on … well … me.